"The Free Software Foundation has published a third draft of the GPL3 license. The FSF had indicated leading up to this draft that it would be addressing some concerns it had with the Novell-Microsoft agreements in the draft. Here's Novell's position on the new draft."

The FOSS community looks at the whole picture, that's why people are so upset by this deal: in the bigger scheme of things this is not a simple "let's interoperate" deal, which nobody could sensibly object (after all, isn't that the aim of the SAMBA project? you know, those pesky Linux zealots wanting to interoperate with the MS servers?), but it's an attempt to divide the community to conquer it. And a quite successful attempt, at least in the "corporate community" (is there such a thing?), judging from your comment.

In fact, thanks to this deal, the Linux users are now divided in "the haves" and "the have nots": have (not) what? Why, but Microsoft's blessing in running Linux, don't you know? because there's so much MS IP in Linux, somewhere, so you got to have their blessing to run Linux. And no, you don't get to know what this IP is, that'd be too easy.

"Listening to customer" is MS' mantra to justify anything they do: who is creating tension and strife here? could that be MS' FUD (TM)? the "what a nice little OS you have there, now fork some money because it'd be a shame having somethin' happening to it" perhaps?

Well, d'you know what? there's a reason why it's called free software, and that's just because we want to be free from this racketeering scheme, free from greedy corporations, free from the "oh I will eat that bug if you give me enough money" mentality. The day we'll need MS' blessing to run Linux will never arrive. You call that "rhetoric", I call it "sound principles".